The treble Ernest Lough’s solo singing earned instant acclaim on HMV’s 1927 release of Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer. Andrew Green tells the story of the recording’s phenomenal success
June-December, 1927: 316,997. The initial sales figures were staggering. HMV’s innocent-seeming recording of Mendelssohn’s motet Hear My Prayer featuring the treble Ernest Lough and the choir of London’s Temple Church ‘took off like a rocket’ recalled John Whittle, a sound engineer for the company. ‘The accountants couldn’t believe it.’ Part of the explanation was the critical acclaim for the recording – in the Westminster Gazette, for example: ‘This boy has a voice of beautiful quality and sings with a maturity of style and phrasing most unusual for one of such tender years.’ Spot on. Well over a quarter of a million more sales followed in 1928. Crowds flocked to Temple Church services in the hope of hearing Lough sing ‘live’.
HMV catalogue number C1329 went on selling for decades. It was Lough’s delivery of that ‘O for the wings of a dove’ finale to the motet that especially tugged at the emotions. Missionaries in Africa used his winning tones as an evangelising tool. In the 1950s, the young David Jones (David Bowie to you and me) was captivated by repeated listenings of Hear My Prayer on the family gramophone. Actor/filmmaker Richard Attenborough had a similar childhood experience and later used the recording to haunting effect in the 1964 thriller movie Séance on a Wet Afternoon.
‘Master E Lough’, as the record label had him – ‘Fluff’ to fellow choristers – was the quintessential ‘household name’ between the wars. Yet Lough insisted the spotlight could easily have fallen on another of the exceptional Temple Church boy soloists – Ronald Mallett, perhaps, or Douglas Horton. Robin Lough, one of his three sons, recalls: ‘My father was so modest about the recording’s success. It drove our mother mad! He said it was “a team job”, but it was his voice that made the recording famous.’
Exactly when and why 15-year-old Lough was chosen as the Hear My Prayer soloist by legendary Temple Church organist and choirmaster George Thalben-Ball isn’t clear. Premeditated or spur-of-the-moment? Ernest’s version, according to son Graham, was that ‘it was a case of which boy’s voice Thalben-Ball felt was in the best shape on the day’. Peter, the oldest of the Lough brothers, nonetheless cautions that ‘No one knows
